Fanboy Rage: Gav’s Top Ten Comic Book Artists And FUCK YOU If You Don’t Agree

by clementinepumpernickel

It’s been a year since Comic Book Resources published their 125 best comic book artists, as voted for by the readers of the site. After chatting with my friend Gav about our respective selections I realized that we had voted for quite different artists, both from each other and from the eventual winners of the vote. I’ve given you my top ten writers and artists, and Gav — in two guest posts — will also provide his lists, just so that we can be all fanboy-ish and rage at the idiocy of what the other nerd has chosen.

I’ve enjoyed every comic I’ve read drawn by P Craig Russell, but even if I’d only read ‘Ramadan’ in issue #50 of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, he’d still make my top 10. The story is a lusciously-illustrated Arabian Nights fantasy, hosted by series-star Morpheus and showcasing Gaiman, Russell and letterer Todd Klein at the very top of their respective games. At Russell’s request, Gaiman wrote the story as prose rather than a traditionally comic script, letting the artist have free reign.

09 Darwyn Cooke

Cooke combines great storytelling with a clean, cartoonish style that is perfect for the superhero genre. His square-jawed depictions of heroes are reminiscent of the 1940s Fleischer Superman cartoons and the excellent Batman: The Animated Series, so it’s no surprise to discover he worked as a storyboard artist on the latter. He can write, too: his New Frontier juxtaposes the classic silver-age DC superheroes with the real world events they debuted against.

08 John Romita Sr

Jazzy John is THE Spider-Man artist. Ditko may have created the original look (with an assist from Kirby), but Romita made it his own. His background in romance comics made him perfect for the soap opera exploits of Peter Parker, an element just as important to the webslinger’s success as the super-heroics. To this day, whenever Marvel tries to take Spidey back-to-basics, it’s the John Romita era they’re channelling.

7 Frank Miller

Specifically the ’80s Frank Miller, mind. Sometime after The Dark Knight Returns, Miller started to believe his own hype, and he’s grown steadily more self-indulgent ever since. These days, both Miller’s art and writing is a ridiculous parody of past glories. That doesn’t change how glorious those past glories were, of course. Miller pretty much invented the film noir as comic book style, and the influence of his Daredevil run casts a long shadow over the recent work of Bendis and Brubaker. Considering the boundaries of sex and violence in mainstream comics he broke down, it’s ironic that Miller did his best work in a monthly comics-code approved superhero book for Marvel.

6 Mike Mignola

Any comic drawn by Mike Mignola is worth a look. If the story’s good too, it’s a bonus. Mignola’s distinctive style with its expressionistic use of light and shadows make him a perfect fit for – yep, you guessed it – Batman. But he’s also lent his fantastic visuals on everything from Rocket Racoon to Aliens. It’s easy to see what Guillermo del Toro saw in Mignola’s creator-owned Hellboy.

5 David Mazzucchelli

With Mazzucchelli it’s all about quality over quantity. His two collaborations with Frank Miller on Daredevil: Born Again and Batman: Year One are a quarter of a century old, and yet they’re arguably the still the fan favourite stories of both characters. In both stories, he brings gritty, noir-influenced visuals to the world’s best street-level vigilantes. Although he hasn’t worked for the big two in a long time, his influence is still evident in the work of Michael Lark, Alex Maleev, Sean Phillips and pretty much everyone who’s worked on a crime comic since.

4 Tim Sale

How good is Tim Sale? Answer: when he draws a Jeph Loeb book, nobody notices how bad the writing is. (Okay, some of Loeb’s stuff honestly isn’t that bad, but with Sale drawing it really doesn’t matter).

3 Norm Breyfogle

Another Batman great (you may be noticing a pattern). Breyfogle, together with Alan Grant, introduced a slew of brand new villains for the hero who already had the best rogue’s gallery in fiction. Very few artists have been able to match Breyfogle’s the sheer badass physicality of Breyfogle’s Batman in combat.

2 Neal Adams

How can you begin to describe the awesomeness that is Neal Adams? If comic-book art is traditionally torn between ‘realism’ (a la Alex Ross) and Kirby-style expressionism, Neal Adams manages to combine the best of both worlds. Adams worked on X-Men before Wolverine was a twinkle in Len Wein’s eye. In the four decades since, nobody has made the mutants look more modern or dynamic.

1 Marshall Rogers

For me, the definitive Batman (in an extremely crowded field) is Marshall Rogers’s Batman. The best representations of the Dark Knight have certain elements in common: shadows, angles, darkness, kinetic movement. Marshall Rogers did the full package better than anyone. His 70s collaboration with Steve Englehart in the pages of Detective Comics remains a high water mark to this day. Reading it now, you wonder if the success of this run lies in the fact it’s a very different take on Batman: with its ongoing subplots, epic showdowns and strong emotional undercurrent, it’s basically Batman written Marvel-style.

3 Comments to “Fanboy Rage: Gav’s Top Ten Comic Book Artists And FUCK YOU If You Don’t Agree”

Great list Gav. The only artist I would maybe dispute would be P. Craig Russell, but that’s because I’m a little colour-blind to his work: I just don’t ‘see’ it. He may be a great inker; I’ve never understood the hype for him as a penciller. Still, he gets a lot of love, and so it’s maybe just me.

It’s interesting that you mention Mazzucchelli as an influence on Sean Phillips and Alex Maleev, as I thought that Mazzucchelli was a ‘sleeker’ artist. I can see what you mean though, when you consider that Mazzucchelli is really courageous with the spot-blacking when he’s inking, a theme that runs through a lot of the artists that you like (Cooke, Mignola, Sale et al).

I liked your positioning of Adams between Alex Ross and Jack Kirby. It’s interesting that Ross’s ‘Batboy’ proposal, that saw him pencil and ink instead of paint, was very reminiscent of Adam’s 70s work. Also, Adams is clearly an influence on the Image artists (the better ones anyway). Certainly, they took their ability to meet deadlines from him. Neal Adams is almost a nexus between all these diverse artists, and you can see his influence both in the photo-realism approach and the more dynamic/splash-page-heavy Image styles.

Thanks for the comment. I can’t answer for Gav (the author of the post) but I would plump for Daniel Clowes, Charles Burn, Dave Mckean, Robert Crumb, Farel Dalrymple, Jamie Hewlett, and the late, much-missed Seth Fisher. You may notice that I have listed only seven artists, and some of them have also drawn superheroes. This should tell you a good deal about how much of a philistine I am with the more cultured end of funny books, sorry, ‘graphic novels.’

If I could add on artists that have more unusual styles who have done superheroes, I would include Geoff Darrow, Mike Allred, Kev Walker. Oh, and Bill Watterson, for Calvin and Hobbes.